Someone just had to go and do this, didn't they? One of my sole pleasures in life (cue violins) has been pitting my wits against the spreadsheet application Excel. Against the odds, I have devised formulae and functions, and code, to push Excel into doing things it was probably never designed to do.

Many of these were useful, like a staff rota and a technical support reporting system. Others were simply for the heck of it, like my (in)famous Homework Excuse Management System, which will tell you instantly if a pupil has used the same excuse before for not handing in their homework.

I even have a folder on my computer labelled 'Useless Utilities', which houses the results of my experiments. For example, there's the one that will create an index sheet from all the worksheets in a workbook. And there's one that does the opposite, that is creates separate worksheets from a list of titles in a single worksheet.

In other words, that folder, together with the other applications I've mentioned, and more, represent my lifelong quest to challenge myself to ever greater heights of spreadsheet brilliance.

But as far as formulae are concerned, none of that burning the midnight oil, searching forums for advice, poring over tomes with such enchanting titles as 'Advanced Functions and Formulae for Excel' is necessary. How come? Because ASAP Utilities has it nailed.

I haven't counted them all, but there must be scores, if not hundreds, of ready-made formulae that can be applied immediately. As if that wasn't bad enough, the program is free for non-commercial use, and it seems to work with any version of Excel.

The screenshot shows just a few of ASAP's utilities...

... as does this one.

So, my days of tweaking Excel are over, apart from fiddling with bits of code now and again. Still, I haven't done much with Microsoft Word for a long time....